883: The Confidence That Only Experience Brings | Javier Echave, CFO, Heathrow

“I took it badly,” recalls Echave, who adds that for some time he had perceived himself to be “number two” within Heathrow’s senior finance executive ranks.   

According to Echave, after having been passed over, he received some critical advice from the chairman of the airport’s executive board.

“He said to me, ‘No one questions your potential and no one questions your strengths, but if you don’t face an interview while believing that you can make a position yours, there’s no chance that you ever will,’” remembers Echave, who notes that he then began to think hard about whether others might see him as having a lack of confidence.

Still, given the extant circumstances, the chairman’s insight was not likely to benefit Echave—or so Echave believed, until the interim CFO exited the position within the first 300 days, leaving a second interim CFO opening that Echave then subsequently filled.  

Fortunately for Echave, the opportunity allowed him to once and for all address the chairman’s comments.

“I determined that my confidence had this Achilles heel, which was that people were questioning it and wondering whether I had become too senior too early,” comments Echave, who reports that ultimately his wife helped him to understand how revealing his passion for the job would better display his self-assurance.

“She told me, ’You cannot beg for this—you have to be humble, but you also have to show that you are ambitious as well,’” remarks Echave, who emphasizes the power of ambition.

He explains: “This allowed me to bring out my confidence and express why I really wanted the job—and within 6 months, I had it.” –Jack Sweeney

Just a few inches below you – you are traveling with everything from Salman diamonds, horses, and cars to farm goods, ventilators, masks, vaccines, and just about everything that you can think of. I think that this is one of the things that makes us so special. We are literally the gateway connecting the UK with global growth.

Operationally, we operate the two busiest runways in the world. That (volume) has forced us to become extremely competitive and extremely optimized operationally. We are the home of the three largest airline alliances, and their self-catering operations themselves make up almost a small city. We have 400 companies and 75,000 people. We are the owner of the largest private road network work in Europe and one of the largest electricity networks in Europe as well.

At the end of the day, all of this is for a single purpose, which is to give passengers the best airport service in the world. Our success is about the service that we can bring you. Perhaps you’ve seen this absolutely fantastic movie Love Actually, which is about the hero being involved in special magic moments in the Arrivals lounge at our terminals. When you see families being reunited, when you see businesses taking off, when you see people experiencing and going out on an adventure, this is really what the hero is all about. Because of this, people will see the airport as the hero—which actually we are not, as we are a service company.

I think that this is not only one of our airport’s fundamental challenges but also one of its great opportunities. We are a service business through which services are provided by people for people. Therefore, delivering this culture of of service, this culture of collaboration, is critical for us. Our joint success with our airline partners and ground handlers is about delivering this service every day. When you go into the airport, you go through different processes: You check your bags, you go through security, you experience our fantastic retail services, maybe you jump into a bus before walking down a jetway into an aircraft. When you return, you reunite with all of these processes. All of these services that you experience are provided across 400 companies.

So, culturally, if you are a service provider, you might have a very narrow view of your own role. You take care of the areas for which you’re explicitly responsible. But when you really ask consumers who is helping them, they actually don’t know—and often they don’t even care about how or with whom they are interacting. I think that what they do care about is that they want to group together fantastic end-to-end experiences. I think it was Maya Angelou who said something like, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The long-lasting memory that you get when you travel through Heathrow is very important. You might have had a bad day with one of our critical airline partners. Security might not have been performing well. Immigration, which is provided by the government Home Office might have had a terrible queue or a meltdown of systems. Maybe even the surface-access transportation getting you into the airport might have been on strike or simply delayed. But the reality is that after a few weeks, what you will remember is whether you had a good or bad experience at Heathrow. This is really what it counts, and it’s really what will influence your decision about where to travel.

Obviously, if you are an American passenger traveling to Dubai, you have choices: You can commute via Heathrow, but also you can commute via Fraport or you can commute via Madrid or you can commute via other routes. At the end of the day, your overall experience over time is really what will cause you to choose one airport over another. So, the culture and the experience at Heathrow are really the things that are so vital and so special.

jb